There’s something incredibly endearing about Infinitely Polar Bear’s unostentatious simplicity. Constructed on familiar indie tropes – a hand-made, whimsical aesthetic, a period setting, a family unit defined equally by conflict and closeness – the film sidesteps cliché to conjure an utterly charming experience. Infinitely Polar Bear’s impossibly twee title is paraphrased from Faith Stuart’s (Ashley…
My expectations for Run All Night were probably set higher than your average punter. It’s not that I’m a big proponent of the ubiquitous Liam-Neeson-Is-An-Alcoholic-Who-Shoots-People pseudo-franchise of the last decade or so – I couldn’t bring myself to watch Taken 3 – but that I was simply excited to see another picture from director Jaume…
Inherent Vice is one of those rare examples of cinema where the experience of the audience is entirely aligned with the experience of the film’s protagonist. This achievement should celebrated when found in great horror films, that terrify and alienate you along with their characters, or classics like Goodfellas, which follows sharp-edged cocaine dynamism with…
Particle Fever takes a notoriously inaccessible topic – particle physics and the search for the Higgs boson – and makes it as accessible as possible. Explanations of the Large Hadron Collider, the conflict between models like super-symmetry and the multiverse model and the statistical significance necessary to identify said boson are conveyed with direct explanations…
“It’s all about focus,” Nicky (Will Smith) explains to his willing con artist protégé Jess (Margot Robbie). He’s talking about successful pickpocketing – the way that staring into someone’s eyes will draw their focus to your face rather than your hands, and similar tricks designed to facilitate sleight of hand – but we are expected…
There’s a lot to like about In Bloom, Georgia’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film in last year’s Academy Awards. The storyline pairs the small-scale coming of age story of two girls, Eka (Lika Babluani) and Natia (Mariam Bokeria), with a nuanced interrogation of power in the midst of Georgia’s 1992 civil war. Directors Nana…
It’s strange the memories that stick with you. I saw Purity Ring in concert two years ago, but the structure of their setlist and the sound of their performance elude me. I do remember, though, the fragile papier-mâché lanterns decorating the stage. I remember the audience, enshrouded by half-darkness and glazed with sweat, swaying to…
“If Norwegian kids disappear, there’s always some obnoxious parent out looking for them.” The “Norwegian kid” of In Order of Disappearance is one Ingvar Dickman, an airport employee who meets a grisly end after getting on the wrong side of a gang of drug dealers. The “obnoxious parent” is his father, Nils (Stellan Skarsgård): Citizen…
On the surface, A Most Violent Year is markedly different from Chandor’s first two features – about Wall Street and the ocean, respectively – but it shares with them a disinterest in traditional dramaturgy; these films are political statements first, stories second. Margin Call was an excoriation of self-interested capitalism on the cusp of devastation,…
It’s easy to commiserate with the difficulties John Ridley – Oscar-winning screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave – faced getting his passion project, a biopic of Jimi Hendrix, off the ground. Unable to acquire the legal rights to Hendrix’s recordings or songs (a common problem – notice that the only Hendrix song you ever hear…
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